To the relief of trees everywhere, the proliferation of digital documents has rendered paper documents obsolete in many situations. Digital technology has made it easy to duplicate and distribute digital versions of what used to be reams and reams of paper filed in countless filing cabinets. While the technology for capturing these documents has changed dramatically over the years, the approach to organizing them and retrieving them generally has not.
Today, file systems still use the traditional concept of filing cabinets and folders in organizing data, where files are logically “placed” in one of the folders on the system. Browsing for these files is just as archaic, and still resembles manually rifling through a filing cabinet full of paper documents. A file is considered to be stored in just one folder location, and the user is forced to look through a number of folders and subfolders to peruse the documents that are on the computer system. Additionally, the browsing interface provided to the user is static, and largely ignorant of the significance of the data being displayed. This ignorance and static browsing capabilities limits the amount of information provided to the user, and tends to complicate and prolong the user's efforts at browsing for files in the system.
For example, FIG. 2 shows an example of a browser panel 201 offered in the MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP® operating system. The panel 201 shows the contents of a folder (C:\Folder), which contains a number of subfolders and files, and includes the folder address 202, the names 203 of the various elements shown, their size 204, their type 205, and their date of modification 206. The layout of panel 201 is the same regardless of the contents being displayed, even if the panel's layout would result in an inefficient display. For example, the system shows a blank for the size of the two subfolders, but if “C:\Folder” contained only subfolders, the browser panel 201 would still display the “Size” column 204, with an entire column of blank entries. This column of blanks would still occupy the same width allotted to the Size column 204 in the panel's display format, and may well force certain more meaningful information off of the current display area.
Today's computer systems are being presented with more and more digital files to manage, and there is an ever-present need to improve the efficiency and clarity with which file information is give to the user as the user browses the files on the system. Prior browsers, such as panel 201, have room for improvement in this area, and such improvements are described below.